We live in the age of the subscription, and those prices are going up all the time. If you’re not careful, you can end up paying out loads of money for a bunch of services that might not be worth it, and that got me thinking… Strava, are you worth my cash?
The year is 2008. Up until this point, most cyclists have recorded their bike rides through the medium of a pen and paper in training diaries. I remember filling out Cycling Weekly’s mileage calendars, or, people simply went for a bike ride, armed only with jam sandwiches and a rough idea of when they’d be home.
After launching in 2009 as a phone app that would drain your battery faster than a Cav sprint, it quickly became the way many of us log bike rides, runs, swims, hikes and all sorts of other activities. But then Strava paywalled a lot of the features people loved in May of 2020 and since then, the price has risen quite a bit.
What does it cost?
2021 Strava Premium Segment Explorer.png (credit: road.cc)
Let’s start by looking at what Strava costs. In the UK, you’re paying £8.99 per month or £55 for a year, which is what I do. If you’re a student, the price is quite a bit lower and if you and three of your ‘family’ go in for an annual plan together, you’ll be paying £25 each per year.
> How much does it really cost to be a cyclist?
Because Strava acquired the Runna brand recently, you can pop your accounts together for £120 per year. There was a time where I was training for a half and was paying for both Strava and Runna separately, so this combined deal is nice to see, especially for hybrid athletes.
But, you can still use Strava for free.
What do you get for free?
strava club posts.png (credit: road.cc)
With the free version, you can still upload your rides, join some clubs and importantly I think for everyone, you get the safety features where you can hide the start and end of your ride so that people can’t see where you live.
If you record your ride through the app, people you select can get a text to track you in real time, which can be helpful if you have a problem.
Once you’ve uploaded a ride, you get your basic stats, a map of where you went and you can keep tabs on your annual distance in the Training Calendar. But the main thing that I think made Strava popular, is something you now have to pay for.
Kings & Queens
Box Hill Strava KOM (credit: road.cc)
Sprinting for imaginary finish lines which offer little more than a vague sense of self-worth has been my entire personality for many years now, but Strava’s KoMs and QoMs are out of reach to all but the fastest riders.
The people at the top of the leaderboard are ridiculously fast, but you can still keep track of your best time, and race your friends.
> How to use Strava to make you fitter
Chasing your local segments is actually quite good fun and Strava has taken, what I think at least, are good steps to keeping things interesting for a wide number of riders.
If you get a premium subscription you’ll get access to more than just the top 10 for any segment with additional leaderboards for the year and by age and weight.
I understand why Strava put most KoM results behind a paywall because that’s a lot of data it has to store, but doing this, added to most KoMs being out of reach.
Mapping
Strava new heatmaps November 2024 (credit: road.cc)
Strava’s route builder is one of the things that keeps me renewing that subscription each year. For planning road rides it is the best that I’ve used, and I’m not surprised.
Strava now has a huge database of where people like to ride, so if I select a start and a finish point, its algorithm has a good idea of where the nice roads are, and it generally does a good job of routing you on the good stuff.
I don’t use my personal heatmap that much, but I’ll sometimes turn on the global heatmap to see if a road is well-used by other riders. I’ve found this especially helpful in the mountains or when planning a gravel ride as sometimes you’re just unsure of how suitable a road or trail is. If loads of other people have ridden it, then generally it’ll be ok.
It is also very smooth to use on the app, which I found myself doing quite a bit this year, but Strava does have some competition.
Garmin Connect is free to use, even if you don’t have a Garmin and, on desktop at least, the route builder is pretty good. Komoot is also an excellent option, especially if you’re a bit more adventure-orientated.
And then if you use a Wahoo, you’ll probably already know, but creating a route on their app is dead easy.
AI (Athlete Intelligence)
2024 Strava Athlete Intelligence (credit: road.cc)
One feature that annoys me so much that I’d consider cancelling my subscription is Strava’s use of AI.
This is, for me, one of the clearest examples of a company shoehorning AI into its service, probably in an attempt to provide customers with a sense of value. But I think they’ve got this so incredibly wrong.
I believe Strava’s AI, or Athlete Intelligence as they call it, is just dumb. It will take the basic data of your ride and give you a very general synopsis of what you did, which I think is useless, because you just did that activity.
It will also feed off your title and description giving further unintelligent insights. My real issues with this feature boil down to two main points.
Firstly, the AI feedback lacks any sort of real purpose. For a newer rider it doesn’t offer any helpful tips about, for example, pacing a climb more effectively.
For an experienced rider, I’m getting no helpful insight into how I could be faster, or where my weak points are.
And secondly, this feature is being advertised as a benefit of my subscription. If it isn’t telling me anything useful, and I don’t want it, why do I have to pay for it?
Liam’s running times were a fair bit faster than Strava’s predictions, rendering the feature useless (definitely not a humble brag) (credit: road.cc)
While we’re on the AI subject, Strava has started providing you with performance predictions and they’re mostly aimed at runners. Unfortunately, once again, I have found them to be a bit useless. While I was training for a half marathon earlier this year, I did some 5km and 10km tests to try out my race day pacing.
During this test I set a 10km pb, yet when Strava adjusted my predicted 10km time, it was slower than I’d just run, which makes no sense. Then when I did my half, I ran something like 5 minutes faster than my Strava predicted time.
If you’re not a big runner, that might not sound like a lot, but that’s a huge chasm when it comes to pacing, so I really wouldn’t follow its guidance too closely.
Thankfully, you can turn the AI stuff off if you have a premium subscription. You just go to a ride, tell the AI to say more, then you just tap a button and it’ll turn off the AI on all of your activities.
Alternatives
2023 Komoot Garmin send to device (credit: komoot)
If you see a ride-sharing app like Strava as another social media platform, then I think Strava is the best. It has good chat functions and being able to export a little data overlay of your activity so that you can brag on Instagram is great.
It’s also the best for those of you who love chasing segments or just comparing climbing times.
For gravel riding and mapping adventure rides, Komoot would be my choice, especially the free version. It has a whole community around it and I can’t describe how useful I find the notes feature where people can describe trail conditions and give pointers. Finding decent gravel riding is sometimes a bit tricky in the UK, so having this info is incredibly useful.
The best free alternative for road riding, however, has to be Garmin Connect. The mapping is good, the amount of data available is way better than in Strava, its training tools are decent, if a little messy in their layout, and Garmin’s pre-made coaching plans are good too.
This works best if you have a Garmin, but there are services like RunGap which you can pay for to integrate any device onto Garmin Connect.
But, I don’t think Garmin can really match the community elements of Strava, so it’s probably one for those of you who simply want to analyse your data and track your rides.
Will I pay for Strava next year?
Strava route planner (credit: Strava)
There are some things that really frustrate me, but for the amount that I use it, I think the price is alright, so I’ll leave my Strava subscription rolling.
That said, I really want Strava to go back to focusing on some of the central features that people sign up for. So can they bring the data analysis up to the level of Garmin Connect, can their mapping adopt any of what maps Komoot great for adventure rides and can it improve some of those woeful AI features?
Do you pay for Strava, and if not, why not? Let us know in the comments as always